Portfolio: Tarrah Aroonsakool
Pig Special, 2022, tissue paper, toilet seat covers, newsprint, cardboard, egg cartons, and acrylic, 24 x 18 x 7 in.
[Image description: A highly realistic sculpture of a pig carcass, split open and hanging from its legs.]
Split down the middle, gouged of any inners, a pig hangs upside from a wire. Horrific in its brutality, the realistic corpse in Pig Special appears fresh from the butcher. An immediate unease can be felt across the room in which the sculpture hangs. There is something deeply disturbing in its pink flesh yellowing and the raw edges of its stomach violently torn open. Its execution, I argue, evokes a confrontation with disclosure—much stronger than a face off with death. In leveraging the viewer’s gravitation towards horrific iconography, artist Tarrah Aroonsakool uses the distorted and dissected to comment on a monstrous transformation of the body that results from economic exploitation. She suggests that under Capitalism, both man and animal are subject to an irreversible stripping of life. That in our economic system, the disenfranchised face a great loss of bodily function and/or selfhood. By resituating the distanced routines of hard labor, the artist brings an invisible suffering into the audience's proximity. Suddenly, viewers are robbed of our mutual discretion concerning the operations that occur behind industrial walls and on distant rural acres. The slaughter staged by Aroonsakool goes beyond pigs, and targets the audience’s ego and decency. The violence, in an act of conquest, serves as a reminder of the primitive ways that we as humans choose to consume, and so feverishly at that.
Leg Special, 2021, watercolor and gouache, 30 x 40 in.
[Image description: A brushy painting of six human legs arranged in a yellow tray as if they were pieces of meat in a grocery store.]
The subject matter of Aroonsakool’s work has always been grotesquely violated. In a uniquely capitalist sensibility, the vitality and/or individuality of the subject has been stolen through the means of oppression. It is when we turn a blind eye to slave labor, sweatshops, and unregulated work environments that our market brutalizes the worker in an unremorseful extraction of output. Addressing themes such as consumer alienation, exploitation of marginalized communities, and hyperconsumerism, Aroonsakool forces audiences to confront the means of production and labor practices that we as civilians financially uphold within our socio-economic structures.
In her mortifying manifestations of consumption, Aroonsakool repurposes discarded materials to juxtapose decay with the aesthetics of allure and suggests a perversion in what we crave. Prioritizing abandoned objects as her medium and/or source of inspiration, she positions the discarded as revitalized with new-found purpose. In upcycling materials that have been refused, and framing them as objects that parallel marketable goods in our economy, Aroonsakool asserts that the wear of an object is not a litmus test of desirability. Through her active interest in the neglected, she affirms the audience’s ability to reassess the lifespan of our possessions and, at large, the value of the worker.
Our Skins Crawl, 2023, discarded clothes, salt, and acrylic, 50 x 40 in.
[Image description: Three narrow, white canvases hung in a row. Each canvas in the triptych has a red, flesh-like form sprawled across it.]
Consumption, particularly within the Western context of late-stage Capitalism, treats manpower as disposable. The worker, objectified as a finite source of input, continues to be replaced upon maximum exhaustion. In Aroonsakool’s painting Leg Special, dismembered legs, folded at the knee, are packed tightly in a yellow tray encased with plastic. Bruised and stained with blood, their stark dehumanization highlights the way Capitalism values individuals abilities and not wellness. As consumers choose to extract only assets of desire, with Capitalism encouraging countless niches where all particularities have their respective market, we fail to make informed decisions on the impact of our purchasing power. Equally sinister, Our Skins Crawl is an arrangement of three white canvases, with imitations of flesh stretched across each. The human leathers act as objects of exhibition. In using the traditional display convention—canvas mounted on wall—this horrifying scene becomes a spectacle for voyeurs. The skins are a haunting portrayal of the objectification that accompanies the capitalist gaze of the masses. In the reduction of our flesh—the shell of our totality transformed into an ornamental act of drapery—the audience is given an unsettling reminder of the cheapness that is placed upon our lives. Even in death, our bodies are expected to entertain and remain a source of productivity. Historically, and as a continued practice emboldened by emerging technology, our likenesses are increasingly imitated, our corpses are studied, and our artifacts are sold off and/or exhibited. The laborer is never afforded rest, alive or dead.
Carcass strung up high, dismemberment, or flesh sprawled thin—the body emerges stripped of its selfhood. Aroonsakool’s shocking and graphic work uses the revolting as an evocative vehicle to prompt us to reconsider our relationship with the objects we covet. Facing the uncomfortable reality that our desires come at a profound cost, Aroonsakool challenges us to grapple with the fleeting condition of market desirability and its complex relationship with decay. As is often the tale of the artist and their work, Aroonsakool creates a posthumous market for the laborer and their bodily contributions. Through such a decision, she opens the dialogue on an economic-induced ravaging, and in a powerful subversion of said dynamic, bests Capitalism as its own game through the decoy of the tormented. As audiences increasingly demand the digestible (or, as Aroonsakool alludes to, the special cut of meat) her work forces audiences to confront our perverse hungers through an offer of the pre-gouged, a disturbing trophy, to satiate the gratification of the hunt.
—Adrian-Dre Diaz, writer, curator, and arts administrator